The collaboration between revops and GTM leaders reminds me of the story about a cat and a dog that were forced to share the same bed. Not those cute dog and cat movies on Instagram, you get what I mean. You can also decide for yourself who is the cat and who is the dog in the story.

There are tons of reasons why this collaboration is so broken (yes, yes, in every company except yours). And as always, it's a story with two sides. Let's start with some stuff that is really painful for revops.

The "can we just" requests

There are two types of "can we just" requests: the ones that are annoying due to their scope, and the ones that are annoying due to a complete misunderstanding of how things work on Salesforce. The important part is that they are both annoying.

Some of my favorite examples:

• Can we just add another checkbox field?
• Can you just build an automation that updates this for me?
• Can we just change this report?
• Can we just have a dashboard that shows how close I am to quota?
• Can we just export this data into a spreadsheet?
• Can we just make this change live?
• Can we just make an exception to the assignment rules?
• Can we just unrequire this field?

And my all-time, personal favorite that I've seen make some of the best revops out there throw themselves over a ledge: the infamous "Can you just change it back?"

Vs. the "not now"

And on the other hand...

When sales people do sales, they sometimes only think about sales. Hitting quota is a massive mental and physical undertaking, and AEs just want to close the next deal.

There are a couple of polarized views that create all this fun: short term vs. long term, single rep vs. multiple teams, the view of Salesforce as a simple system with simple processes vs. the reality.

The most frequent way I've seen revops push a GTM leader’s buttons was when the default answer for any request was a short "no" or when asked to elaborate, then the answer became two words "not now".

It usually sounds something like this:

• The next few sprints are already full.
• Is it more important than X from last week?
• Let's meet and I can show you a workaround.
• Sure, it'll take 3 months.

My all-time favorite: nothing moves faster in the org than an AE complaint.

What causes all this fun?

High pressure, intensity, big personalities - these are constants that always create some friction.

However, there are also additional factors that contribute to this broken workflow:

Strategic Alignment

• SDRs chasing demos while revops think about pipeline.

Implementation Details

• Object names or record types that are only understood by revops.

Process alignment

• Many times sales only knows their team's process (at best), without understanding how it's connected to the company's process.
• Sometimes, ops teams are familiar with just parts of the process, and can’t empathize with the end-users experience.

Communication

• Salesforce admins constantly need to translate the requests they receive to a functional and cohesive Salesforce implementation. Often, the AE don’t understand the details of the implementation - so there's no way for them to know whether something will actually solve their issue.

Complexity

• Many times, an AE thinks that they are asking for a minor change. However, in reality,  Salesforce’s complexity may turn this change into a project with many risks to the CRM configuration.

Bottlenecks

• Revops are getting bombarded with asks from every team. They are the only ones who can edit the configuration. This centralization is crucial for the stability of the system - but hurts velocity and the growth potential of the company.

I hope this is helpful! Let me know if you have any other questions.